The present invention relates to a portable cellular phone capable of displaying characters including Chinese characters.
FIG. 2 is a block diagram of a conventional portable cellular phone having a function of being able to display Chinese characters and store a character code as telephone directory data while a telephone number data set is added to the character code. In FIG. 2, reference numeral 201 designates a portable cellular phone; 202 designates a telephone directory storage section; 203 designates a display section; 204 designates a display control section; 205 designates a display character data storage section for storing character data for display purpose; 206 designates a control section for controlling the overall portable cellular phone; and 207 designates a Chinese character converter section.
With regard to the example mentioned above, the operation of the cellular phone for displaying characters including Chinese characters will now be described. To the control section 206 is sent a Chinese character code into which Japanese-kana characters or roman alphabetic letters are converted by the Chinese character conversion means 207. The control section 206 adds a telephone number data set to a character code including the received Chinese character code, as required, and stores the Chinese character code into the telephone directory storage section 202. The control section 206 sends to the display control section 204 the character code including the Chinese character code received from the Chinese character conversion means 207 or from the telephone directory storage section 202. The display control section 204 reads from the display character data storage section 205 character data for display purposes corresponding to the received character code and displays the thus-read character data on the display 203.
However, the conventional portable cellular phone mentioned previously requires incorporation of Chinese character conversion means for converting into a Chinese character code from a character code, such as Japanese-kana characters or roman alphabetic letters, and a display character data storage section for storing display character data corresponding to all characters beforehand. For this reason, contrasted with another type of portable cellular phone incapable of displaying or storing Chinese characters, the aforementioned cellular phone is required to store an enormous amount of character data for display purposes. Another problem of the foregoing conventional cellular phone is the necessity of storing character data sets which are not used by the user.